If this isn’t the most easily offended civilization in world history, I’m glad I missed whichever one was worse.

Still, our modern thought police—those prigs and fussbudgets and censors and tattletales and hall monitors and snitches and meddlers and natural-born teacher’s pets—insist that “political correctness” was a brief blip on America’s cultural radar that evaporated sometime in the mid-1990s.

As with everything else, they are wrong.

Whereas PC was still somewhat a fringe phenom in the 1990s, it has become the very fabric of our dying civilization. It is now so pervasive and dominant that it only seems invisible. It has metastasized into the popular narrative and continues expanding with no end in sight.

Never has so much bitterness and hostility been expended in the service of kindness and compassion. Oh, how I loathe the desiccated, humorless souls of the neo-tolerant, those whose endless capacity for getting offended has itself become offensive, who are morally outraged at the mere suggestion that they are absurdly prone to gross public displays of moral outrage. Hear them spout off about their dimly conceived and shabbily articulated notions of human rights, ones that conveniently always seem to trample on the rights of other humans.

“I’m sorry—did I say ‘advanced’? I meant to say ‘descended.’”

One need not try to offend them. Even if you don’t try, they’ll get offended. Even if you make a conscious effort NOT to offend them, they’ll get offended. The very air they breathe offends them. They are offended by everything except their own existence. Look at them whining and whimpering and wailing, curled in a ball at the bottom of the shower, picking at their scabs and pretending to nurse self-inflicted wounds that they never intended to heal.

It almost makes the idea of committing hate crimes against them seem pleasurable, but not for any of the reasons they’d think—not their skin or gender or what they do with their genitals. No, it’s their personalities. It has always been their personalities and their personalities alone. In case I still need to spell it out for you, here’s the problem: T-H-E-I-R P-E-R-S-O-N-A-L-I-T-I-E-S.

A dozen years into the new millennium, our culture has advanced to the point where we are expected to celebrate Chaz Bono’s muttonchops and the fact that she sawed off her bazooms.

I’m sorry—did I say “advanced”? I meant to say “descended.”

The Old Weird has become the New Normal, and the Old Normal has become the New Hateful. The New Tolerance is actually the New Intolerance, espoused exclusively by the New Assholes.

They’re not offended that the world is falling apart. That bothers them not a whit. Instead, they shed crocodile tears while Rome burns.

Here are ten egregious examples of political correctness from 2012 which were by turns absurd, dangerous, or both.

SWEDEN DENIES THE EXISTENCE OF GENITALS
Sweden, that Ladies’ Paradise where everything is rape, wishes to become a “gender-neutral” society, which presumably means that all Swedes will be shorn of their genitals, preferably on live television. This insane cultural putsch involves everything from gender-neutral pronouns to gender-neutral bowling and gender-neutral schools where boys and girls are called “friends” rather than “boys” and “girls.” Even their toys are becoming gender-neutral. Give it twenty years and expect a monster wave of incredibly messed-up young Swedish adults.

OLYMPIC ATHLETES GET BANNED FOR THEIR GROSSLY INSENSITIVE TWEETS
The blonde and lithe Greek triple jumper Voula Papachristou was barred from triple-jumping at the London Games due to a “racist Tweet” that to me seemed more insulting toward mosquitoes than Africans. Days later, Swiss soccer player Michel Morganella was banished from the Games after calling South Koreans a “bunch of mongoloids,” which was clearly intended to hurt the feelings of people from Mongolia.

MENTALLY RETARDED BLACK CONGRESSMAN APOLOGIZES TO MIDGETS
Georgia Congressman Hank Johnson believes that islands can capsize, which is why his mentally retarded constituency continues reelecting him. He recently used the word “midget” and then was forced to apologize for uttering what he calls “the M word,” a term which is “no longer socially acceptable.” If anything, this situation proves the oft-rumored fearsome power of the Midget Lobby and the fact that they are obviously higher in the social pecking order than retarded black Congressmen.

PRO-GAY HETEROSEXUAL MAN BULLIES CHICK-FIL-A CASHIER OUT OF A FREE CUP OF WATER
As if this summer’s pro-gay poo-flinging temper tantrum over the fact that Chick-Fil-A’s Chief Operating Officer made the unforgivable statement that he supports “the traditional family” wasn’t infantile and ridiculous enough, an Arizona douchebag named Adam Smith filmed himself harassing a female Chick-Fil-A cashier while treating himself to a free cup of water at the company’s expense. The cashier showed tremendous patience with Smith, who later apologized to her in another display of rank narcissism. In his initial video, Smith claimed there’s “not a gay in me,” although I suspect there have been several.

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF GEORGE ZIMMERMAN’S WHITENESS
Although the slayer of Trayvon “Skittles” Martin was so Peruvian-looking that he wouldn’t have seemed out of place building Machu Picchu, most major media insisted he was “white,” ostensibly because it’s become very hard to find white people committing actual hate crimes against nonwhites these days. In a repellent case of media malpractice, NBC nearly ignited a race war by selectively editing Zimmerman’s 911 call to make it appear as if he made a point of Martin’s blackness. When evidence emerged that Martin was not a cherub and that Zimmerman appears to have acted in self-defense, the cowardly Cultural Marxist media quietly walked away from this story like they always do.

THE RITUAL SELF-CASTRATION OF AMERICAN MALES
Many men are so unmanly and uncomely that they can’t get laid unless they pretend that many women aren’t crazy, which is why some of them go to the extreme of holding self-shaming placards explaining why they are feminists. In what was easily the most vomit-inducing video of the year, a group of “Conscious Men” released a video called “Dear Woman” in which they apologize on behalf of the negative male energy that other men radiate. They also promise to never radiate such negative male energy nor, presumably, any male energy whatsoever. And the eternally repugnant Roger Ebert wrote an article called “Women Are Better Than Men,” which is arguable, although I wouldn’t deny that most women are better than Roger Ebert.

THE HORRIFYING REVELATION THAT SANDRA FLUKE CLAIMS TO HAVE A LOT OF SEXSandra Fluke became a progressive hero because she demanded that the taxpayers—most of whom presumably wouldn’t want to have sex with her—should fork over the ducats for her birth control and because a mean radio host implied she might be a slut. If she wants people to believe she has a lot of sex—well, at least the sort of sex that leads to conception—this is her God-given right, and I will not question whether there are enough men willing to have sex with her. It’s entirely possible. But it’s questionable. That’s all I’m trying to say. But for the record, she is not a slut. She’s simply a homely, pampered, mannish, sanctimonious, insufferable person who claims to have a lot of sex.

EGGED ON BY WHITE MALE PRIVILEGE, WHITE MALES GO ON SHOOTING RAMPAGES
Black American males commit murder at a rate roughly four times their quotient of the population and are even said to be overrepresented in “crimes involving the death of four or more people.” Despite all that, dumb white dudes and dumb white chicks insist that shooting rampages are due to dumb ideas such as “white male privilege,” which my arrogant and entitled sense of white male privilege leads me to deny even exists outside the warped minds of sheltered white academics.

THE UNFORGIVABLE WHITENESS OF HBO’S GIRLS
Lena Dunham, girlish creator of the show Girls, describes herself as “a half-Jew, half-WASP,” which is why she wrote “two Jews and two WASPs” as her show’s main characters. Then everyone complained that there were too many WASPs on her show.

THE EMINENTLY POLITE JOHN DERBYSHIRE GETS BANISHED FROM POLITE SOCIETY
Mathematical Magician and Logical Titan John Derbyshire wrote a piece for Taki’s Magazine in April that led to his dismissal from National Review. Amid the chest-beating and shirt-rending that ensued, no one bothered to dispute what he said; instead, they seemed horrified that he had the guts to say it. It was the first column mentioned in The Atlantic’s “50 Worst Columns of 2012.” It also earned Taki’s Magazine a permanent link on the Drudge Report’s home page. In this case, I’d like to thank the world for getting so easily offended.

SIGN UPDaily updates with TM’s latest

Copyright 2018 TakiMag.com and the author. This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only. You can order reprints for distribution by contacting us at editors@takimag.com.